On paying creators

People should be paid for their work. Starting in 2017, The Interconnected is paying our contributors.

Writing is work. Writing is hard work, honestly. You’re taking a nebulous mix of ideas and feelings that live in the grey matter inside your skull, and using a mix of education, cultural information, and creativity, forging it into a form that means other people get a similar mix of ideas and feelings in their own grey matter.

Writers are often paid little, or not at all. A professional rate in the science fiction short story market, for example, is six cents per word. A five-thousand word piece nets $300, and may have taken many hours to write. A professional rate in the nonfiction market can be higher or lower, but is often a fixed rate – $100 for an article, or $200, or $50, or nothing at all.

We’re paying writers.

At The Interconnected in 2016 we paid our writers with thanks. But we want to do more, because our writers deserve more.

We’re now extending the offer to the greater UX, content strategy, development, design, and “web maker” world. We’re paying $25 per article; currently we can accept about 2 or 3 articles per month. Submit to us or pitch an article.

Help us fund quality writing.

We’ve currently got enough funding to support our writers at this measly rate through 2017, but we think we can do better, and you can help.

Support us on Patreon. We’re still working on goals and levels of support, but even a tiny pledge will help fund better writing about the human side of technology.

The Interconnected brings a diversity of new and experienced voices to the web. We hope you’ll continue to support us, whether it’s financially, by reading and sharing what you read, or by working to make the web a better place through whatever means you have available.